Design Objective

TL;DR Don't just seek out companies with beautiful products to work on—it probably won't matter anyway because there's more to it than visuals. Find companies with strong values and friendly people, that's what really matters. (4/4)

Laura Klein "Ok, how many other designers saw this and were sure those were sticky notes?" 😂

ABC News Stunning drone footage follows school of Cownose Rays swimming in crystal clear waters off the Australian coast.

Techtopia

A few people were even met with the business ends of a firearm and were taken into custody forcefully after disagreeing with police. Some actually endured the terrible experience of spending a few hours in jail—but a few either spent considerable time behind bars— once case resulting in two weeks in prison.

None of the Above

To the customer who accidentally got given a bottle of Chateau le Pin Pomerol 2001, which is £4500 on our menu, last night - hope you enjoyed your evening! To the member of staff who accidentally gave it away, chin up! One-off mistakes happen and we love you anyway 😉

Subtitles aren't just for deaf people. Lots of my hearing friends use them, too. If you're hearing and find yourself using subtitles on Netflix and TV and would quite like them at the cinema, please retweet to help normalise their presence! Big thanks

This is what FB developers will see in their local sandbox when building features for the upcoming redesign. Regardless of your stance on FB the company, this is a really powerful example of how a considered developer experience can directly impact the end user experience.

Tools of the Trade

Unlike WSL1, which used a Linux-compatible kernel, WSL2 will use a genuine open-source kernel compiled from the stable 4.19 version release of Linux at Kernel.org.

While Microsoft will be providing the Linux kernel, they will not provide any Linux binaries to go with it. Instead, users will still need to download their favorite Linux distribution from the Microsoft Store or by creating a custom distribution package.

GitHub Package Registry is fully integrated with GitHub, so you can use the same search, browsing, and management tools to find and publish packages as you do for your repositories. … And it supports familiar package management tools: JavaScript (npm), Java (Maven), Ruby (RubyGems), .NET (NuGet), and Docker images, with more to come.

Seb Lee-Delisle "Look at this gorgeous thing. I learned to program on this in 1983. The Sharp PC-1211"

I turned down Daniel Buchmueller for a job at Netflix. After a 60 minute interview I was on the fence, so I concluded that he "wasn't senior enough." He went to Amazon instead where he co-founded Amazon Prime Air (their drone delivery service) and was #2 on Fast Company's "Most Creative People" list.

At some point, we programmers are going to have to admit that we really can't judge another programmers technical abilities in a 60 min interview. We end up hiring programmers that are good at interviewing, but not necessarily good at doing the job. And we miss out on engineers like Daniel.

I listened to four years of my Alexa archive and found thousands of fragments of my life: spaghetti-timer requests, joking houseguests and random snippets of “Downton Abbey.” There were even sensitive conversations that somehow triggered Alexa’s “wake word” to start recording, including my family discussing medication and a friend conducting a business deal.

I used to feel that tech companies competing to market “privacy” could only result in a win for consumers. Now I’m starting to wonder if it serves the same purpose as carmakers adding an “eco” mode to your SUV.

Techtopia

These Ads Think They Know You The good news is, the data that's collected about you isn't all that accurate. The bad news is, inaccurate data is used to make decisions about you:

The accuracy of predictions made by data providers is difficult to verify. The companies release little evidence that those included in these groups actually belong there. A study from 2018 found that the gender assigned by data brokers was accurate, on average, only 42 percent of the time — that’s worse than just flipping a coin. So in the ads we bought, we expected many men would see ads aimed at women and vice versa.

Electric Sheep

Chris Harris This is such a cool effect: "First attempt at removing cars off the roads with neural nets. Will have to dream harder."

None of the Above

Kelly "I saw this on reddit and I’ve watched it a minimum of 27 times and every single time it has only gotten better and exceeded my expectations"

Daniel Silvermint 👇 No spoilers in this thread, other than you might care less about the last season, after reading this (I do). Also applies to many other TV shows (and some movies) that struggle to switch between plotter and pantser modes:

It has to do with the behind-the-scenes process of plotters vs. pantsers. If you’re not familiar with the distinction, plotters create a fairly detailed outline before they commit a single word to the page. /2

KRON4 News When your city has a chronic infrastructure problem, but also strong DIY ethos:

'Pothole Vigilantes' are hitting the streets of Oakland at night to fill potholes

Design Objective

Based on consumer insights and learnings, do you have a product strategy that defines your hypotheses about what you hope will fulfill the trifecta of delighting customers in hard-to-copy, margin-enhancing ways?

Note to self: only use certificates that expire on a work day morning, early in the week. You will thank yourself later.

Locked Doors

Sindre Sorhus I had a similar issue with nodejs/security-wg. Overzealous attempts to flag expected behavior as security vulnerabilities is not helping open source security:

Many of @snyksec's vulnerability reports are bullshit. They classified all execa versions as vulnerable because it exposes childProcess.exec(). Duuh. That's kinda the point of the package. They also don't contact maintainers before publishing their reports either.

On Thursday evening, Pornhub VP Corey Price claimed in a statement to BuzzFeed News that his company is “extremely interested” in buying Tumblr and “very much looking forward to one day restoring it to its former glory with NSFW content.”

Emma Taylor 👇 Alternative title, "[How] the Allies won the war because a coder wanted his lunch sooner"

How do I know so many made-up stories about how the Enigma code was cracked and didn't know until yesterday how interesting the real story is? A volunteer at the National Museum of Computing at Bletchley Park just casually blew my mind with a bit of the story. /1

Design Objective

Your periodic reminder that design is what ships, not what you want to ship.

nicole The hardest problem in design is knowing the limits of the medium:

it takes 1 minute for a designer to add unnecessary fanciness that costs a developer hours of time, technical debt, and can even make things less accessible by not using out of the box element features

Just interrupting truism "older people don't use technology" to remind it's often because tech DOES NOT WORK FOR THEM.
Low circulation in your fingers? Touch screen won't respond. Got a tremor? Out of luck. Low contrast designs without zoomable text? It's doable but exhausting.

Tools of the Trade

last week i got to witness an engineering department lose a full day's work because if you put an emoji in a git commit message, Atlassian Bamboo chokes on it forever and you're forced to rebase master, like you should NEVER DO. this was of course referred to as The Emojiency

somebody asked me which emoji it was, and i didn't actually know, so i had to go find out

Back when there were 12 pence in a shilling and 20 shilings in a pound, the IBM 1401 computer had optional hardware (i.e. transistors) to do arithmetic on pounds/shillings/pence. Of course, there were two incompatible data standards—BSI and IBM—so this knob selected the format.

Lines of Code

Among the most mind-boggling allegations in Hertz's filed complaint is that Accenture didn't incorporate a responsive design, in which webpages automatically resize to accommodate the visitor's screen size whether they are using a phone, tablet, desktop, or laptop.
...
Accenture also failed to test the software, Hertz claimed, and when it did do tests "they were seriously inadequate, to the point of being misleading." It didn't do real-world testing, we're told, and it didn’t do error handling.

Techtopia

I’m a responsible parent so I use the controls on iOS to limit screen time on the old iPhone my 9-year old uses. A white-listed exception is iMessage; he’s worked out he can send someone a YouTube vid then watch it in iMessage to circumvent the control. So proud 😅

Danny Tuppeny We're slowly approaching the point where you need DevTools and Wireshark just to keep the lights on in your house:

The smart meter in-home-device that @bulbenergy gave us seems to do 2 DNS queries every 3 seconds. The WiFi light is continually flashing like it can't connect. 🤷🏼‍♂️

the researchers not only found that cryptocurrency users have in the last few years stored their crypto treasure with hundreds of easily guessable private keys, but also uncovered what they call a "blockchain bandit." A single Ethereum account seems to have siphoned off a fortune of 45,000 ether—worth at one point more than $50 million—using those same key-guessing tricks.

None of the Above

ScienceHex I love this new meme that's going around Twitter of people as X:

Peopleware

Hillel 👇 TL;DR We have ample evidence that sleep and stress affect our productivity. Also, we know code reviews are very effective. The rest is opinion.

One of my most controversial software opinions is that your sleep quality and stress level matter far, far more than the languages you use or the practices you follow. Nothing else comes close: not type systems, not TDD, not formal methods, not ANYTHING.

Second order thinkers ask themselves the question “And then what?” This means thinking about the consequences of repeatedly eating a chocolate bar when you are hungry and using that to inform your decision. If you do this you’re more likely to eat something healthy.

Teamwork

John Cutler 👇 Sprints are about incremental delivery, iterative development, and rapid learning. Not more frequent deadlines. Thread:

The value of “sprints” is largely misunderstood / glossed over.

Sprints are meant to be a healthy (and effective) forcing function / enabling constraint ... not a way to drive teams/individuals...not a hamster wheel ... not “breaking up a project” (1/n)

“It doesn’t feel random when it happens three times in a row. It doesn’t feel random when you see that all the people around you, who don’t look like you, aren’t asked to step aside,” Knoderer said. “I don’t want to change the way my hair grows out of my head.”

It's taken me 45 trips around the sun, but for the first time in my life I know what it feels like to have a "band-aid" in my own skin tone. You can barely even spot it in the first image. For real I'm holding back tears.

"… When we looked into the steps people were going through to verify their accounts we found that in some cases people's email contacts were also unintentionally uploaded to Facebook when they created their account," the spokesperson said in a statement.

Within a few hours, the worst Tide Pod videos were scrubbed from YouTube, and the platform changed its algorithm so anyone searching for them would be shown a safety video.

“No debate, just action,” said Mr. Pritchard. A few months later, P.&G. announced that it would resume advertising on YouTube.

Sam This is creepy! But also, what other words can I yell into my phone and have free stuff delivered to my house?

I yelled into my phone “I’m pregnant” for 5 minutes on Sunday to see which apps would start advertising baby things. Definitely NOT pregnant. Zero babies in my sphere. Didn’t get any ads, but just received these free formula samples in the mail, which is creepier.

Inventor of the Dishwasher: I HAVE CREATED SOMETHING THAT WILL MAKE ALL YOUR LIVES EASIER.
Humanity: WHOA. So we just put dirty dishes in and it cleans them?
IoDW: Um, no. You need to wash them first.
H: Uh...
IoDW: Not thoroughly. Just, like, what you'd do if you were drunk.

I actually asked the doctor this week if I needed a measles booster and he replied by rote “only if you’re traveling places with outbreaks and low vaccinations rates” and then he stopped and we looked at one another awkwardly.

Klara Sjöberg "What happens with you divide by zero on a mechanical calculator."